A
commonplace of the American Revolution held that citizens must have
a love for liberty and a willingness to sacrifice and fight for it.
Otherwise, no paper constitution alone can ever preserve their freedom.

Today,
it is becoming equally commonplace that this spirit of liberty is
leaving Americans, that we are becoming “a
nation of sheep,” as Judge Andrew Napolitano puts it in a new
book, who acquiesce in the progressive abrogation of our Constitution
and liberty.

This
is plausibly attributed to several factors: mass affluence, cultural
decadence, the loss of religious faith. But I believe one major factor
has been seriously overlooked: the breakdown of the family and the
growth of divorce. Moreover, this is not some nebulous “cultural”
contributor that somehow saps Americans’ willingness to defend their
freedom. The cause-and-effect is directly demonstrable. The reason
is that we are now raising our children according to the principles
of tyranny.

Divorce
sends many harmful messages to children and future citizens: that
we can break vows we make to God and others; that family members may
be discarded at will. But among the most destructive are about the
role of government: that government is their de facto parent that
may exercise unlimited power (including remove and criminalize their
real parent) merely by claiming to act for their greater good.

While
feminists push divorce-on-demand as a “civil liberty,” in practice
divorce has become our society’s most authoritarian institution.

Some
80% of divorces are unilateral: the action of one spouse alone and
over the objection of the other. One spouse’s “freedom” to leave a
freely contracted marriage, therefore, means tyranny over the other
spouse in forcibly separating him from his home, property, and most
seriously, his children. And while marriage is an agreement freely
entered into by both parties, with only a nominal role for the government,
unilateral divorce must be enforced by the coercive machinery of the
state. Otherwise, the involuntary divorced spouse may continue to
claim the right to live in the common home, to enjoy the common property,
and above all, to parent the common children. These must be curtailed,
or at least controlled, by the state.

This
entails a massive extension of government power – and straight into
precisely the realm from which its exclusion until now virtually defines
freedom and limited government: the realm of private life.

The
moment either spouse files for divorce, even if the other is legally
unimpeachable, the government takes control of the children, who become
effectively wards of the state. Unauthorized contact by a parent becomes
a crime, and the excluded parent can be arrested and incarcerated
without trial through a variety of other means that by-pass constitutional
due process protections: domestic violence accusations, child abuse
accusations, inability to pay “child support,” even inability to pay
attorneys’ fees.

Legal
jargon and clichés like “divorce,” “custody battle,” and “child support”
have led Americans to acquiesce in this massive intrusion of state
power over their freedom. We don’t say that the government arbitrarily
took away someone’s children; we say he “lost custody.” We don’t say
a legally innocent citizen was interrogated by government agents over
how he lives his private life; we say there was a “custody battle.”
We don’t say a citizen was incarcerated without trial or charge for
debt he could not possibly pay and did nothing to incur; we say he
“didn’t pay his child support.” These clichés and jargon inure us
to tyranny.

But
worst of all, we are raising generations of children to believe that
police and jails exist not to protect us from dangerous criminals
but to keep away one of their parents, and that the criminal justice
apparatus may be marshaled against family members who have committed
no legal infraction.

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Using
instruments of public criminal justice to punish private hurts turns
the family into government-occupied territory. The children experience
family life not as a place of love, cooperation, compromise, trust,
and forgiveness. Instead they receive a firsthand lesson in tyranny.
Empowered by the state and functioning essentially as a government
official, the custodial parent can issue orders to the non-custodial
parent, undermine his authority with the children, dictate the terms
of his access to them, talk to and about him contemptuously and condescendingly
in the presence of the children as if he were himself a naughty child
– all with the backing of state officials.

Eventually
the children understand that the force keeping away one of their parents
is the police, who are the guarantors of the custodial parent’s supremacy.
Thus the message the children receive about both the family and the
state is that they are dictatorships, ruled by an arbitrary power
which can be marshaled against private enemies and even family members
for personal grievances. If a loved one disagrees with us or hurts
our feelings or is simply no longer desired, there is no need for
forgiveness because a telephone call will have him removed, and the
police will make sure he stays away. And if the police can be used
to arrest Dad because he does something Mom doesn’t like, what will
they do to me if I do something Mom doesn’t like?

After
witnessing this dictatorship over the non-custodial parent, the children
may then experience it themselves. Lacking firm authority that is
in any sense moral, as well as any effective restraints on her behavior,
the custodial parent now exercises unchecked power over the children
as well, a relationship that becomes increasingly strained and acrimonious
as the children grow older, less credulous, and more rebellious. As
the children react adversely to this destruction of their home and
father, or as the cute and cuddly children become rebellious adolescents,
they can be turned over to state agencies by their mothers, as large
numbers now are. If more vigorous instruments are required, various
arms of the state – psychotherapists, police, and penal institutions
– can be marshaled against the children as well. Thus
the drugging and institutionalization of children in foster care,
psychiatric hospitals, juvenile detention facilities, and jails that
has become increasingly familiar.

In
July 2001, The Progressive magazine detailed how “parents”
are now turning their troublesome teenagers whom they cannot control
over to the police. Overwhelmingly, though the politically correct
article does not point this out, these parents are single mothers.
In the single-mother home, “Wait till your father gets home,” has
been replaced by, “I can turn you over to Social Services.”

On
the other hand, perhaps someday they can commandeer the police and
jails against family members with whom they have differences or against
anyone who hurts their feelings. While many children are materially
impoverished by family breakdown, in other cases the systematic bribery
dispensed by the divorce industry extends to the children themselves,
who may be rewarded for their cooperation with material opulence,
forcibly extracted from their father and used to corrupt his children
and give them too a stake in his plunder and exile.

It
is not difficult to see that this is a highly unhealthy system to
have in a free society. In fact, the logic is reminiscent of another
system of domestic dictatorship that once tried unsuccessfully to
co-exist with free civil government. Politically, the most powerful
argument against slavery – and what eventually did more than any other
to bring about the realization of how threatening it was to democratic
freedom – was less its physical cruelty than its moral degeneracy:
the tyrannical habits it encouraged in the slaveholder, the servile
ones it fostered in the slave, and the moral degradation it engendered
in both. Such dispositions were said to be incompatible with the kind
of republican virtue required for free self-government.

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Abolitionist
Charles Sumner’s warning of slavery’s impact on the moral development
of white children growing up in slave societies was at least as alarming
as concerns about cruelty to black ones. “Their hearts, while yet
tender with childhood, are necessarily hardened by this conduct, and
their subsequent lives perhaps bear enduring testimony to this legalized
uncharitableness,” he wrote. “They are unable to eradicate it from
their natures…. Their characters are debased, and they become less
fit for the magnanimous duties of a good citizen.” Something similar
may be seen today in the children of the divorce regime. No people
can remain free who harbor within themselves a system of dictatorship
or raise their children according to its principles.